Nuptials
by PallaPlease
Summary: A fanfic involving Kida and Milo after the departure of the crew.  Fluff alert and usage of an actual song from 1914. [Complete]


Nuptials  
  
*****  
  
Author's Notes: Okay, I know everybody's going write a 'what-happened-to-Kida-and-Milo-fanfic' pretty soon, so, heck, I might as well write one, too! Anyway, remember the scene in which Kashekim Nedakh (the sadly deceased king of Atlantis) 'passed on the burden' to Milo? I'm not sure if most everyone else noticed it, but that burden was that of kingship. *^.&* Considering the fact that Kidagakash was next-in-line for the throne (and the fact that it is SO obvious they're going to get together), wouldn't they have to get married? Also, it wasn't shown in the movie, but there was a banquet hall/ballroom in the old Atlantean palace. (This is known courtesy to Disney Adventures - my parents subscribed me to it. ;] My parents are cool!) The song Milo sings to Kida (oh, there goes a piece of the horrible plot…) is "By the Beautiful Sea," lyrics of which were written by Harold Atteridge, music by Harry Carroll. *&.^* It's an actual 1914 song, from the year the movie's set in. By the by - it was never mentioned how much time had elapsed between the scene where the crew left for the Iceland coast from Atlantis, and the scenes were the crew was talking to Mr. Whitmore while Kida and Milo 'built' the statue (?) of Kashekim. I'm going by maybe two weeks, okay?   
  
Disclaimer: All characters belong to Disney and their affiliates that were associated with the making/production/final product of the film "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," for which we should feel eternally indebted. "By the Beautiful Sea" was written by Harold Atteridge (lyrics) and Harry Carroll (music).  
  
Dedicated to: My puppies Jagër, Luckee, and Tobias "Toby." Why? I have no idea whatsoever. *sweatdrops*  
  
Rating: PG, just to be safe. Mentions of possible *ahem* activities. What, you want a 'quality-of-story' rating? In that case, * out of a possible *****. :]  
  
Brief Moment of Miscellaneous Stuff: …dot-dot-dot…dot-dot-dot…  
  
*****  
  
Fingertips brushing the smooth surface of the stone resting beside him, Milo James Thatch glanced down at his lanky, slender hand, so pale in comparison to the smooth darkness of the graceful, admirable Atlanteans. Ruins had been transformed into idle beauty, still retaining a mysterious downed air, but becoming something that was safer to exist in. Wrinkling his eyebrows together, lifting his hand, he traced the contours and patterns of his palm and fingertips with the other hand. Something was different about him, he realized, something had been changing in him all along, ever since their king… Kashekim Nedakh…gave him his own shard of the enigmatic blue power crystal. What was it that Kida had told him, those few ten days ago? The crystal drew life from the past Atlanteans and in return it gave them power, longevity, contentment. He was going to live for centuries; was his body shifting internally to cope with this new change? Milo grimaced at the thought. He'd never been comfortable with the prospect of some doctor messing around with his body, inside or outside, so it was easy to assume that he wasn't any more happy with the idea of a crystal doing the same. At least it wasn't cutting him up.   
  
As if drawn by a force not of his own - something it might just have been, Milo's left hand slipped away from his right, reaching up to grasp the smooth, symmetrical shard that Kashekim had given him. The burden that was to be Kidagakash's, as the dying king had said, was to be Milo's. He only had half of an idea what that burden was, and if his grasp of the Atlantean culture from the Shepard's Journal was as accurate as he had been led to be, he had serious doubts of his remaining a bachelor.  
  
The Shepard's Journal lay by his bare foot, a wind in the cavern ruffling through the hundreds of pages, yellowed parchment crackling and sighing. Brown eyes drawn to it, he stooped, letting the wind touch his narrow, slender face and breeze through his unbuttoned white shirt, trousers molding to his legs due to the wind, lifting the worn brown book up, gazing intently at it through his thin glasses. "What more can I learn from you?" Milo whispered to it, running a hand through his dirty-blonde hair.   
  
"Perhaps how to stop being such a loner?" Kida's lightly accented, exotic voice cut through his thoughts, and the reed-slender princess vaulted over the arching rock he was crouching by; he slipped, startled, landing hard in a sprawling sort of sitting position. "Supuk," she greeted, smiling disarmingly, white locks falling haphazardly about her elegant, brown face.  
  
"Uh, supuk," he returned, ducking his head in a brief nod, closing the book he held almost absently.  
  
"Why do you keep coming up here?" she questioned after a moment, sidling over to him, staring questioningly into his darker eyes, smiling as his glasses slid, of their own accord, down his nose. Pushing them back up with her finger, she continued, "Do you miss your friends?"  
  
To his mortification, he blushed lightly from the close proximity of himself and Kida, though it wasn't an abnormal occurrence. "Ah, well," stammered Milo, unable to look into her amused, secretive blue eyes, so out of place on her dark, dark face. "I guess so…"  
  
Frowning, Kida stood, grasping the open collar of his shirt and hoisting him to his feet with the supernatural strength the Atlanteans were graced with. Although he was aware that his lifespan was expanding to Kida's, he also knew that some aspects of the Atlantis people's lives would never be his. Inhuman strength? Never. A soul-to-soul bond with the crystal? Again, never.   
  
"Come, Milo," she ordered, moving her hand from the collar to his, weaving her fingers with his fingers. "Beket, Milo. I wish to show you something."  
  
"Eh?" was his intelligent response.  
  
She pulled him along, running and springing from rock to rock, until they were at the mouth of a spiraling staircase that dove straight into a literal stone well; the only thing that kept it from being entirely underwater was the thick stone encasing that rose like a solid column. "Down!" Kida cried, laughing as she slipped her hand out of his and danced down the steps, twirling and shrieking with enveloping laughter, vanishing from sight when she reached a curve some length down. "Milo!" her voice echoed somewhere down, down.  
  
With no other choice, he set down after her, shivering a little and buttoning up his shirt, leaving only the collar open. "Kida!" Milo spoke softly, hurrying down the steps. "Kida!"  
  
The steps of iridescently glowing stone seemed to stretch on forever, in undying blue loops that spiraled slowly downward into what sounded, from the rustling echoes, like an enormous cavern. It was with some relief that he finally reached the end, looking up from his bare feet to blink at Kida. The crystal each wore about their neck shone with the blue light that was a thing Milo had grown accustomed to.   
  
For a moment, the twin crystals pulsed and then the cavern was lit by an unseen light source: bright, and perfectly maintained and balanced.   
  
A table, though he felt that wasn't the appropriate word, went straight for a length of possibly five hundred feet before bending into a different line for the same amount of feet. The table was bent into the shape of the 'king's eye,' and hundreds of silent, waiting chairs lined both sides of the bending banquet table.   
  
There was a small section of space that could have been once used for dancing; whether or not that was what it had been for, Milo wasn't sure of, but he did know Kida was standing there, smiling and holding her hand out for his lighter one.   
  
Hesitantly walking towards her, eyes flickering from decoration to decoration, chandelier to looped cloth, he took her hand and she continued to smile up at him.  
  
"Dance," she said quietly, in the 'gibberish' language of her people. "Dance with me."  
  
And then Kida was twisting her feet and body in intricate ways that made Milo feel clumsy and useless, until she noticed he wasn't dancing with her. Then, insistently, she took his hands and shuffled her feet along the smooth floor until he felt confident enough to copy the move.   
  
"It isn't as hard as it seems, Milo!" she laughed, twirling, silver-white hair spiraling around her face in a circle.  
  
She was beautiful, like the sea had always been. Distantly, he could still remember the first time he saw the sea, when his grandfather Thaddeus took him for a short trip. There was a song that had come out just before Milo had left for the expedition, something about the sea and a beautiful girl.   
  
Without fully realizing what he was doing; he was so preoccupied with tracing Kida's complex movements; he was humming the tune, murmuring the words under his breath.   
  
Kida paused in her dancing, lifting her hands to touch his face, cocking her head to one shoulder, blue eyes curious. "What is that?"  
  
"What?" he blinked, enjoying the texture of her hands on his cheeks.  
  
"You were singing," she tried again, explaining. "What were you singing?"  
  
Taking a breath, he closed his chocolate brown eyes for a moment and he sighed regretfully, cracking open one eye and ruefully saying, "I only know part of it."  
  
"Sing."  
  
Dear Lord, he was blushing again, he could feel it.   
  
" 'Gosh, I want to be: by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea! You and me, you and me, oh how happy we'll be! When each wave come a-rolling in, we will duck or swim, and we'll float and fool around in the water. Over and under, then up for air…' " He broke off, face flushed from embarrassment. "That's all I can remember," he confessed meekly.  
  
"Oh," she remarked, leaning her face forward and up, touching her nose to his briefly. "You sing very well."  
  
"I do?" Milo asked, grinning like an idiot, though he couldn't care less. "Pagen!"  
  
"And your accent is improving," she tacked on as an afterthought. "I need to talk to you, in private, about certain matters."  
  
"Wha?" he protested. "Isn't this place private enough?"  
  
"You are not comfortable," Kida deadpanned. "Follow me."  
  
Up the stairs she went and after her he followed.  
  
Another maze of stairs and corners awaited him and he did his best to keep up with the lithe, dancing figure that was Princess Kidagakash. The recent memory of dancing, or whatever it had been, lingered in Milo's mind for a moment, and he pushed it away, trying to keep from getting lost behind Kida.  
  
After what seemed like thirty minutes of climbing and running, the tall, exotic princess triumphantly threw open a pair of crimson red doors, exposing to Milo a decently large room, elegantly sparse in decorations, but with the rather large pool most rooms seemed to sport in the palace. "This," she declared, throwing one arm out in a showy gesture, "is my room."  
  
All Milo managed to do was choke at the implications.  
  
"I brought you here," she turned slightly, locking eyes with his, taking his hand and leading him down the short staircase, merely three steps down, "to discuss what is to happen with us."  
  
"Happen?" he asked in a tiny, vulnerable voice. "Us?"  
  
"Of course," Kida answered. "I was to be the heir of the throne when," her face creased with a momentary flash of pain, "my father passed away, but he passed the throne on to you, Milo." Casually, she tossed her hair, smirking in a way that unnerved him. "That creates a predicament that we must find a solution for."  
  
"Well," Milo had the sinking feeling he was about to start babbling again, "I'm good with coming up with solutions, and I think I might be able t-"  
  
"Marry me," she interrupted.  
  
That certainly made him halt in his rambling tracks. "Excuse me?" Mind whirring, he tried to figure out when they had gotten this close to the pile of cushions that was apparently her bed and why he couldn't breath.  
  
"Marry me," repeated Kida, leaning forward to whisper against his startled, slightly parted lips. "It will insure that there will be no difficulties with governing and I assume you have realized that." She paused for a second - or, possibly, dramatic effect, like Milo had done before, himself, in all the presentations back at the museum. Distantly, he noted his hands were trembling. "And there is the little fact that I think I'm in love with you, Milo Thatch," she continued thoughtfully, before giving him his first kiss, soft and inviting. His cheeks burst into flames. When she pulled away, she traced the wave of one of his locks and he swallowed, reminding his lungs periodically to breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out. "There are certain traditions," Kida informed him after a moment, "that need to be executed for this to be fully binding."  
  
"Kida," he interjected quickly, scared to death by his own emotions, "do I get a say in this?"  
  
"Do you not wish to be married?" she inquired innocently, placing a finger on her chin.  
  
"I didn't say that!" he blurted, following that with a few sentences that were jumbled and mixed together.  
  
"In that case," smiled she sinisterly, "do as I tell you." The silk cloth covering her lingerie-like clothing slid to the floor.  
  
Milo swallowed, again, glasses slipping down his nose.  
  
***  
  
"Kweyimlimik," Kida murmured, half-dazed.  
  
Milo made an incoherent, agreeing sound that was an odd mixture of English and Atlantean. As he blinked, brain managing to shake back into place, he groaned, buried his face in the cushion by her bare shoulder, and mumbled something even less understandable than his previous word.  
  
"We're going to have to prepare for the official announcement," the princess murmured again, blue eyes fluttering shut. "The people will want to know of our marriage."  
  
"That was marriage?" Milo mumbled, face still buried in the cushion.  
  
"In our case, yes," she replied, lifting the crystal still hanging around her neck. "Our shards bonded us, soul-to-soul, like I am with the crystal itself."  
  
A drowsy 'mmm' came in response.  
  
"We'll also have to prepare for the children," she continued fondly.  
  
"Children?" Milo lifted his head, eyes unfocused and bewildered.  
  
Kida simply laughed and knocked his face back down into the pillow, ordering him to sleep.  
  
*****  
  
End AN: Oh, how pointless that all was. …Do you hate it? It was going to be much longer, but I have three other ideas for Atlantis: The Lost Empire fics, so I…well…that's my excuse, okay?  
  
The next A: TLE story I have in the works is a ficlet for Audrey Ramirez and Joshua Sweet. Yes, you read that correctly. Audrey and Dr. Sweet. You gotta problem with that?   
  
Now, I can't remember exactly whether or not Milo was wearing Kashekim's crystal at the end, but I'm pretty sure he was. The crystal he sent Whitmore could have been a different shard, you know. *&.^*  
  
I do not condone sex before marriage - don't do it. It isn't the right thing to do. Remember, Milo did the right thing several times in the movie - so…do the right thing!   
  
The Atlantean words used were taken from Disney Adventures and the translations are:  
Supuk - hello  
Beket - please [to one person; to a group, it is 'beketyokh']  
Pagen - thank-you [to one person; to a group, it is 'pagekh']  
Kweyimlimik - I had a great time! [*lol*]  
NOTE - Only the pronunciations were available in the DA magazine, so I tried to work out the spellings. Forgive me! I am not worthy of this knowledge! ;]  
  
Remember - chastity is the way to be!  
  
© Purple Mongoose/PallaPlease. June 19, 2001. 


End file.
